Once a teacher whipped me: I bore it bravely in the school: but afterward, at night, when my chum was asleep, I sobbed bitterly as I thought of Isabel, and Ben, and my mother, and how much they loved me: and laying my face in my hands, I sobbed myself to sleep. In the morning I was calm enough: it was another of the heart-ties broken, though I did not know it then. It lessened the old attachment to home, because that home could neither protect me nor soothe me with its sympathies. Memory, indeed, freshened and grew strong; but strong in bitterness, and in regrets. The boy whose love you can not feed by daily nourishment will find pride, self-indulgence, and an iron purpose coming in to furnish other supply for the soul that is in him. If he can not shoot his branches into the sunshine, he will become acclimated to the shadow, and indifferent to such stray gleams of sunshine as his fortune may vouchsafe. Hostilities would sometimes threaten between the school and the village boys; but they usually passed off with such loud and harmless explosions as belong to the wars of our small politicians. The village champions were a hatter’s apprentice, and a thickset fellow who worked in a tannery. We prided ourselves especially on one stout boy, who wore a sailor’s monkey jacket. I can not but think how jaunty that stout boy looked in that jacket; and what an Ajax cast there was to his countenance! It certainly did occur to me to compare him with William Wallace (Miss Porter’s William Wallace) and I thought how I would have liked to have seen a tussle between them. Of course, we who were small boys, limited ourselves to indignant remark, and thought “we should like to see them do it;” and prepared clubs from the wood-shed, after a model suggested by a New York boy, who had seen the clubs of the policemen. There was one scholar, poor Leslie, who had friends in some foreign country, and who occasionally received letters bearing a foreign post-mark: what an extraordinary boy that was—what astonishing letters, what extraordinary parents! I wondered if I should ever receive a letter from “foreign parts?” I wondered if I should ever write one; but this was too much—too absurd! As if I, Paul, wearing a blue jacket with gilt buttons, and number four boots, should ever visit those countries spoken of in the geographies, and by learned travelers! No, no; this was too extravagant; but I knew what I would do, if I lived to come of age; and I vowed that I would—I would go to New York! Number seven was the hospital, and forbidden ground; we had all of us a sort of horror of number seven. A boy died there once, and oh, how he moaned; and what a time there was when the father came!